Prints from The Museum of Modern Art

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Text by Judith B. Hecker.

Encompassing black-and-white linoleum cuts made at community art centers in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance posters and other political art of the 1980s and the wide variety of subjects and techniques explored by artists in printshops over the last two decades, printmaking has been a driving force in contemporary South African artistic and political expression. Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, introduces the vital role of printmaking through works by more than 20 artists in the Museum's collection. The volume features prints by John Muafangejo and Dan Rakgoathe, whose vigorous, metaphoric linoleum cuts conveying social messages were cultivated at Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre in the 1960s and 1970s, posters produced for anti-apartheid coalitions in the 1980s, and political work by Sue Williamson, Norman Catherine and William Kentridge, representing periods of apartheid resistance. More recent projects, including traditional etchings by Diane Victor, comic books by Bitterkomix, lithographs by Joachim Schönfeldt and Claudette Schreuders and digital prints by Cameron Platter, address ongoing social issues and explore new subjects. New linoleum cut projects by a younger generation of artists--Paul Edmunds, Senzeni Marasela and Vuyile Voyiya--demonstrate the relevance of the medium in South Africa today. Judith B. Hesker, Assistant Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, contributes an introduction, biographies of the artists, publishers and printers, and a timeline of relevant events in South Africa.

Confronting contemporary African art’s awkward coexistence with earlier African art as “ethnographic artifact,” Geo-Graphics celebrates the flourishing of African art on the international circuit, while simultaneously asserting its ancestry and critiquing the valorization of heritage. David Adjaye’s photographs of African capitals and an examination of contemporary African art centers further contextualize the continent’s recent cultural transformations.

Published by Hatje Cantz.Edited by Ralf P. Seippel.

In the early 1950s, Berlin-born photographer Jürgen Schadeberg captured Nelson Mandela, (then a young attorney), singer Miriam Makeba and the nightlife in Sophiatown, a dynamic black neighborhood in Johannesburg. Revealing the poverty endemic to the majority of South Africa's black population became Schadeberg's chief focus. He arrived there in 1950, at the advent of apartheid, to work for Drum, the first magazine for black readers. In 1964, when Drum was banned, Schadeberg left South Africa for Europe and the United States, creating a body of portraits unique in their ability to cut across race, class and social standing. In 1994, Schadeberg created an iconic image of Nelson Mandela, by then the first black President of South Africa, standing at the window of his former prison cell on Robben Island, where he had been detained on charges of conspiracy from 1964-1982. Schadeberg, whose work has been highly influential to younger artists, now lives and works near Paris. This substantial volume collects 250 images from across his career.

Published by Silvana Editoriale.Edited and with an introduction by Simon Njami. Text by Frank Vanhaecke.

Photography has proved a particularly essential art in the African continent's postcolonial era, both for recording the numerous seismic moments in its recent history, and for reclaiming the imagery of Africa from its colonial portrayers. As Africa has begun to step beyond its colonial subjugation, photography has also assumed a leading role in providing African countries with individual identities. Tracking the blossoming of postcolonial photography in Africa from 1960 to the present, and accompanying an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010 celebrates 50 years of African photography. Among the 34 photographers gathered in its pages are Rui Assubuji, Nabil Boutros, Loulou Cherinet, James Depara, Samuel Fosso, David Goldblatt, Bob Gosani, Pierrot Men, Zwelethu Mtethwa, Eileen Perrier, Ricardo Rangel, Malick Sidibé and Patrice-Félix Tchikaya. The volume includes an introduction by Simon Njami and a text by Frank Vanhaecke.

A Fiction of Authenticity presents seminal moments for challenging prevailing notions about interculturalism and postcolonial subjects. This full-color catalogue features specially commissioned work by 11 contemporary artists of African descent--each of whom lives and works in either the United States or Europe and examines the invented idea of an “authentic” Africa. Each of these artists has positioned themselves outside the frame of Africa, but each remains connected, and by doing so has created a shift in the way the world considers postmodern and postcolonial art production. The participating artists are Siemon Allen, Fatma Charfi, Godfried Donkor, Mary Evans, Meschac Gaba, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa, Ingrid Mwangi, Odili Donald Odita, Owusu-Ankomah and Zineb Sedira. Also included are seven new essays by some of the most exciting and critical voices working internationally today. A Fiction of Authenticity considers the diasporic positioning of these artists, as well as paradigms of discourse concerned with aesthetics, nationhood, citizenship, community, locality and sense of place.

Ethnically diverse, and blighted by conflict and violence for decades, South Africa has supplied photography with a great deal of subject matter. Today the country's extraordinarily rich photographic heritage is an important part of its continual effort to maintain consciousness of the injustices and crimes of the Apartheid years. South African Photography 1950-2010 includes the work of some of the most important photographers working in the region in the postwar era: Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane, David Goldblatt, Ranjith Kally, Cedric Nunn, Santu Mofokeng, Mikhael Subotzky, Pierre Crocquet, Jodi Bieber and anonymous photographers for DRUM Magazine (BAHA Archives). Encompassing the turmoil and transformations of the past 60 years, this publication is divided into three historical periods: "Apartheid, 1950-1976"; "Struggle, 1976-1994"; and "Freedom, 1994-2010."

Published by Silvana Editoriale.Edited and with an introduction by Simon Njami. Text by Frank Vanhaecke.

Photography has proved a particularly essential art in the African continent's postcolonial era, both for recording the numerous seismic moments in its recent history, and for reclaiming the imagery of Africa from its colonial portrayers. As Africa has begun to step beyond its colonial subjugation, photography has also assumed a leading role in providing African countries with individual identities. Tracking the blossoming of postcolonial photography in Africa from 1960 to the present, and accompanying an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010 celebrates 50 years of African photography. Among the 34 photographers gathered in its pages are Rui Assubuji, Nabil Boutros, Loulou Cherinet, James Depara, Samuel Fosso, David Goldblatt, Bob Gosani, Pierrot Men, Zwelethu Mtethwa, Eileen Perrier, Ricardo Rangel, Malick Sidibé and Patrice-Félix Tchikaya. The volume includes an introduction by Simon Njami and a text by Frank Vanhaecke.

Published by Damiani.By Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu.

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis is absorbed with historical transitions: from the end of the postcolonial utopias of the sixties during the 1980s to the geopolitical, economic, technological, and cultural shifts incited by globalization. This book is both narrower in focus in the periods it reflects on, and specific in the ground it covers. It begins by addressing the tumultuous landscape of contemporary Africa, examining landmarks and narratives, exploring divergent systems of representation, and interrogating the ways artists have responded to change and have incorporated new aesthetic principles and artistic concepts, images and imaginaries to deal with such changes. Organized in chronological order, the book covers all major artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, drawing, collage. It also covers aesthetic forms and genres, from conceptual to formalist, abstract to figurative practices. Moving between discursive and theoretical registers, the principal questions the book analyzes are: what and when is contemporary African art? Who might be included in the framing of such a conceptual identity? It also addresses the question of globalization and contemporary African art.The book thus provides an occasion to examine through close reading and visual analysis how artistic concerns produce major themes. It periodizes and cross references artistic sensibilities in order to elicit multiple conceptual relationships, as well as breaks with prevailing binaries of center and periphery, vernacular and academic, urban and non-urban forms, indigenous and diasporic models of identification. In order to theorize how these concerns have been formulated in artistic terms and their creative consequences Contemporary African Art Since 1980 examines a range of ideas, concepts and issues that have shaped the work and practice of African artists within an international and global framework. It traces the shifts from earlier modernist strategies of the sixties and seventies after the period of decolonization, and the rise of pan-African nationalism, to the postcolonial representations of critique and satire that evolved from the 1980s, to the postmodernist irony of the 1990s, and to the globalist strategies of the 21st century.The main claim of this book is that contemporary African art can be best understood by examining the tension between the period of great political changes of the era of decolonization that enabled new and exciting imaginations of the future to be formulated, and the slow, skeptical, and social decline marked by the era of neo-liberalism and Structural Adjustment programs of the 1980s. These issues are addressed in chapters covering the themes of “Politics, Culture, Critique,” “Memory and Archive,” “Abstraction, Figuration and Subjectivity,” and “The Body, Gender and Sexuality.” In addition, the book employs sidebars to provide brief and incisive accounts of and commentaries on important contemporary political, economic and cultural events, and on exhibitions, biennales, workshops, artist groups and more. Rather than a comprehensive survey, this richly illustrated book presents examples of ambitious and important work by more than 160 African artists since the last 30 years. This list includes Georges Adeagbo Tayo Adenaike, Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Kader Attia, Luis Basto, Candice Breitz, Moustapha Dimé, Marlene Dumas, Victor Ekpuk, Samuel Fosso, Jak Katarikawe, William Kentridge, Rachid Koraichi, Mona Mazouk, Julie Mehretu, Nandipha Mntambo, Hassan Musa, Donald Odita, Iba Ndiaye, Richard Onyango, Ibrahim El Salahi, Issa Samb, Cheri Samba, Ousmane Sembene, Yinka Shonibare, Barthelemy Toguo, Obiora Udechukwu, and Sue Williamson.Okwui Enwezor, a leading curator and scholar of contemporary art, is the Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, and founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.Chika Okeke-Agulu is Assistant Professor of Art and Archeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

Published by Errant Bodies Press.By Alessandro Bosetti.

When Alessandro Bosetti draped himself in sound equipment and set out for West Africa, it wasn't to record native music, but to play experimental and avant-garde composers to locals, and record their responses. This musical portrait of cultural translation includes an audio CD and transcripts of listening sessions.